


Middlefinger Creighton

by ahimsabitches



Category: Dark Souls (Video Games)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Tongues, and betrayal, fingers - Freeform, just... nastiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 06:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16887363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: A friend requested an exploration into Creighton's motives for joining Rosaria's Fingers. I'd never had anything to do with the Dark Souls franchise until I started researching for this fic, and it's pretty cool.





	Middlefinger Creighton

Blood geysered up from the man's neck and rained upon Creighton's helm in soft _tnk tnktnktnk tnk tnk_ sounds. The newly headless corpse clattered to the frost-crusted dirt in a boneless tumble of flesh and armor. He propped his axe against his shoulder.

To think, he had almost pulled it on a goddess. The helm turned his deep raspy chuckle tinny and forced his own hot sour breath back up his nose. His greasy grey hair fell in ropes on either side of his face as he bent to his victim's head.

In his defense, his Lady _had_ looked a damn fright the first time he'd seen her, pale and skeletal on her bower, cuddling a pulsing, veiny pile of flesh twice her size that, if he hadn't just hacked through a hall full of mangrubs before, he would have taken for the largest-- and worst-- stillbirth on earth.

But he had been ignorant and she had, in fact, been beautiful. Beautiful and terrible and full of wonders to work.

But she'd needed tongues, and had set him upon work of his own. Work he did with gladness and joy.

“Dammit,” he muttered, unable to grasp the tongue, slug-slick with blood. He bit the middle finger in his teeth and tugged his hand out of the heavy leather glove that covered his right hand. The tongue was easier to grip towards the back of the mouth, and he held the head by it as he dug under his leathers with his left hand for the small dagger he kept sheathed against his side. A few sawing slices were all it took; the head dropped and rolled away.

He had his tongue.

No, he had _hers_.

Creighton slid the slimy slug-shaped thing into a pouch on his belt, wiped his bloody hand on his shirt, and regloved his hand.

Nobody but the hired knight had menaced him in the snowy thatch-roof town. Now that he was dead and the new winter night was being born around them, Creighton doubted he would get trouble on the road. Which was almost a shame.

“Ah, but I have _you_ now,” he muttered and rested his hand on another pouch at his left hip. A hard spherical thing a little smaller than his fist bulged inside it, and he pulled it out. The polished red orb glared dimly, balefully at him as he held it up. It had no eyes, but Creighton liked to imagine that the crack spidering through its middle allowed his Lady to see him.

_If Creighton the Wanderer needs not wander anymore in the service of his Lady,_ he thought to himself, ignoring the curious faces peering out of cracks in shutters,  _what should he be called?_

An instant before he sent the mental command to the orb, a voice that was not his own answered him:

_Why, whatever your Lady wants to call you._

Though Creighton's feet never technically left solid ground, he landed in the echoing sanctuary with a teeth-rattling _whud_. He swayed on his feet, vertigo from the instant journey juggling his guts. He let go of his axe and clawed his helm off, smearing the congealing blood specks, and both clanged to the stone floor. The cacophony of echoes that returned from the ceiling, rearing into pitch black above all torchlight, made him cringe.

But his Lady, veiled by her own hair, did not look sourly upon him. He pocketed the orb and knelt jerkily, willing his rebellious stomach not to empty its contents onto the worn red carpet and piled coils of his Lady's hair at the base of her raised manger. “Lady Rosaria of Rebirth,” he rasped, fumbling his gloves off and digging in his hip pouch for his— _her_ \-- prize, “it is I, Creighton the-- the Wanderer. I bring you a tongue, so that you may sing again of sunlight, and bless those who worship you with new lives to devote to your service.”

He let the tongue slide out of his hand. It landed on the carpet with a soft _plp._ Silence like riverbed silt lay heavy on him. It was work to raise his head.

The goddess had never acknowledged his presence, not with a nod or a movement of her corpse-colored lips, but he had never left her sanctuary unchanged or emptyhanded.

And yet...

Heart hammering, he swallowed. “Lady Rosaria, ah... I have presented to you my tenth tongue. I have been humble, loyal, and grateful. I have used your gifts only to help me serve you better. I do not know your will, nor should I, but... my Lady, I should like know when I will be titled. I could only serve you better as a Finger.”

His left hand, around the joint of the ring finger to the palm, began to tingle. There, scars puckered the webbing between his fingers and pulled the knuckle up into a painful knot. The tingle became a needling, then a thousand tiny daggers searing the skin and joints. Baring his teeth in pain, he watched as the scars unraveled into smoothness and the crooked joints realigned. Slowly, the pain receded into a tingle, then into nothing. He curled his hand into a fist, opened it, flexing the fingers. The low-level throb of pain that by now had become a part of him was no longer there. He blinked, glanced back up at Lady Rosaria's still form again.

Fitful torchlight chased its own shadows over his Lady's pale face and arms, down over the dark ropes of her hair which covered the blubbery mangrub in her lap like a baby's swaddling clothes. She did not alter her only movement: a soft gentle stroke of the horrible pile of aborted flesh in her lap.

Creighton swallowed his disappointment, dipped his head, thanked his Lady, and backed out of her sanctuary in a half-bow.

“Good work,” a man's voice sneered from the shadows. Adrenaline zipped up Creighton's spine and he gripped his axe, but it was only Ringfinger Leonhard, his hip cocked against the wall and his arms crossed over his armored chest. “For a useless piece of shit.”

“Ringfinger,” Creighton snarled back, jamming his helmet back on his head, “I don't recall ever seeing _you_ here to pay tribute.”

“I usually try to avoid being in the same room as your _stink_ ,” he said, his silver mask adding an odd vibration to his words. “But I knew you'd ask for something ridiculous for your tenth tongue, and I wasn't wrong.” His eyes glittered between the mask and his tattered tricorn hat. “I earned the rank of Ringfinger after my fifth tongue. Yellowfinger had his after seven. Longfinger, after six. Don't you see, Wanderer?”

Dull red anger bloomed in Creighton's guts, but he did not let it surface. His axe had thirsted for that bastard's blood from the start, but he would not shed a Finger's blood so near to Lady Rosaria's bower.

Could not shed a Finger's blood at all. What chances he had of attaining the rank himself would vanish.

“Each in his own time,” he said instead, his voice low and tight with anger.

The corners of the Ringfinger's eyes crinkled. “I'll give you this, Creighton; you _have_ changed since coming here. You're... quieter now. You fight less like a drunk that just got robbed by a whore and more like the knight you pretend to be.” His eyes flicked to the silver staghead on Creighton's chest, now decorated with a second set of bloody antlers from where he'd wiped his hands.

“I'll be a Finger in my own time,” he repeated and turned away from Ringfinger's dancing eyes.

“And what kind of Finger would you be, Wanderer? You're a thief and a liar-- and not a good one at that! Before Rosaria, you were obsessed with a simple ring, only because you'd looted it from a dead man and then had it looted from you! A simple ring, unmagicked, that only harmed its wearer! You were tricked into prison, concocted a fiction about the man who'd bested you, and set out on an embarrassingly long, unsuccessful quest to avenge all of the _imagined_ wrongs wrought upon you, only to find that someone with more wherewithal had done your job ahead of you! What did you do then, hm, _Wanderer?_ Did you relinquish your vengeance and come to Rosaria seeking penance and forgiveness? _No!_ You used the good name of Mirrah to shield yourself as you went on a _killing spree_ which was nothing more than the tantrum of an angry child who was denied what he wished for! You only hauled your filthy carcass up to our door when you got _bored_ of killing for no reason and wanted someone to tell you _why_ to kill again. Oh _no_ , Creighton, you aren't a Finger. You're a piece of jetsam, bouncing aimlessly over the skin of the world, and that's all you'll ever be.”

In the humming echo of the Ringfinger's shouted tirade, Creighton stood steadfast and quiet. Rage had flared hot in him at first, but it had transformed into something black and cold, something he would hold and loose upon his next tongue, upon whose face he would imagine the Ringfinger's, whom he would make _suffer_ before the end. Not for his Lady, no, but because he believed a man should love his work.

The Ringfinger laughed derisively. “I can see it in your eyes, Creighton. If you didn't invade, didn't pillage, whatever would you do?”

Creighton curled his lip behind his helm. “That's just it, Ringfinger. Invading, pillaging, killing... is what I do. It's how I serve.” He reached into his hip pouch and pulled out the cracked red orb. “I _will_ be a Finger, in time. For now...” He jerked his middle finger up at the Ringfinger, and disappeared.

_Middlefinger Creighton,_ he thought to himself, and grinned.  _Has a nice ring to it._

The pulpy mess of blood and bone that had once been a young whore lay before him on the wet cobbles of another winter-sogged shithole in another corner of the Boreal Valley. He was running out of shitholes in which he had never hunted, but if his Lady didn't make him a Finger this time, perhaps she would give him another orb so he could travel more widely.

He pocketed the tongue. “Middlefinger Creighton. Yes, it's... very me.”

And it was, he thought as he pulled out the cracked red orb. His whole life had been a  _middle finger_ to the world, and what better reward than to have his life's purpose officially sanctioned by a goddess?

Even the horrible wrenching way the orb returned him to his Lady's sanctum wasn't enough to wipe the grin off his face.

But it fell on its own as he approached her bower; half the torches lining the walls had been snuffed out, but even in the benthic dimness he could tell the way his Lady was slumped over the mangrub in her lap was...  _wrong._

“My Lady...” he breathed, letting his axe clatter to the ground, and leapt up onto her manger, abandoning ceremony and propriety. She lay facedown on the gently pulsating mangrub, which only now Creighton realized lacked the human half of its body. But that did not matter. He reached out a gloved hand and hesitated inches above her marble-colored skin. Dark blue veins wormed beneath her mottled skin. He drew his stubbly cheek close to her head, but felt neither warmth nor wind of breath. “My Lady?” he husked. He lay a hand on her cheek, meaning to turn her head, then noticed a splash of blood on the mangrub's humped back, so velvety-thick it was almost black, fanning out from beneath the flow of her hair just below her chin. His heart froze in his chest, then rabbit kicked his ribs.

“Such impropriety,” a voice boomed from across the chamber. Creighton snapped his head up. Ringfinger Leonhard stood in the middle of the red-carpeted hall, casually swinging his blade. Drips of velvet-dark blood spun from it and landed on the stone floor. He stuck his middle finger up at Creighton.

“Oh _fuck you,_ Leonhard,” he snarled, and launched himself at the man who had denied him what was his.

 


End file.
